Best Western Hospitality Inn Port Hedland

We arrived at Eighty Mile Beach campsite, originally intending it to be a quick stop over. All we knew was that the campsite was by a beach. So we were understandably excited when we arrived on a beautiful, pristine white beach with bright blue seas and not a soul in sight. On further investigation, we found out that it is the longest stretch of uninterrupted beach in Australia or WA (can't remember which but it’s long at 220km!). It was ...

... We also noticed that everything and anything is sponsored by some mining company or other and that all the cool kids are wearing fluorescent orange safety shirts. We waited at a level crossing for nigh on twenty minutes, as the longest train I have ever seen rattled past, with truck after truck after truck after truck piled high with dirt that presumably concealed some greater prize. As the train curled away towards its destination, it lined the horizon ...

... in South Hedland, about 15mins from Port Hedland itself. It is mainly a residential area. Trish and Col start work at 4.45am and finish at 1pm, so we are just having a nice relaxing morning until they get home. I think we will go over to Port Hedland this afternoon and have a look at all the big mining "stuff" (hoping I become more educated on the terms).

Hope all is well.
Take care,
Katie

... long. This was our problem.
They have recently opened a Macdonalds here.
This town is very spread out nothing much in between the 2 sides just flat floodplains. there is a huge pile of salt that Rio Tinto mine here for all to eat.
Caravan parks are not much to talk about either not alot of shade in any of them from what we have seen and a long waiting list for permanent sites.
There are the Looooooooooooongest trains here in the world they go on for a couple of klms ...

... end to end would stretch for 150km.

We workshopped these numbers a little with the kids:

If when we left Melbourne we'd loaded BHP Billiton's annual exports into the van (along with the bathers and the sherry decanter), given Alec a shovel, and asked him to dig it onto the road as we moved along, then (big breath) if he'd dug out a washing machine sized pile every 15 centimetres we'd still not quite have emptied the van ...

#36

22/9/09

port hedland



After leaving Broome we travelled straight through to Exmouth with only a single overnight stop at Port Hedland. It's an industrial place, every type of equipment store/hire imaginable, massive mounds of salt dot the landscape, enormous port facilities, etc. It will be interesting to see how much this little town changes in the next 10 years – (the mining) business is booming so you have to ...

... the 3 main streets and the only place we found open at 7pm was a hairdressers!! :-) We were told that everything would be shut as it was a Thursday night and the restaurant we were looking for had closed nearly 10 years ago. They were very helpful and we managed to find a pizza.

It's pretty remote here and very industrial, hence we drove in to stock up on food and drinks and will be heading out within the hour!

Hope all is well and we will be in touch soon!

Ok, so the map pin says Port Hedland (which we drove through) but we actually stayed further east on a random campsite in the middle of nowhere, but it seemed like the best option for a stopover between Karratha and Broome (the map feature is just not letting me pinpoint it on the map, even though it is mentioned!). The drive from Karratha to Eighty Mile Beach was fine, just hot, long and boring ...

We left Point Samson and headed for Broome - massive drive (818kms all up) our second biggest drive so far. Nothing interesting at all on the way - just your normal dry rivers, dry landscapes, grey army, expensive roadhouses and a man leading a cart made of half a car and lead by camels - yep, thats right, a man was in the middle of nowhere with 2 camels leading a car ...